Coherent Version

[MSFS 2020] Questions & Community Discussions Aircraft
1

Dear Asobo, Are there any plans to update to the latest version of Coherent in
the future? you might or might not be aware, but we 3rd party developers are
expending a massive amount of man hours when developing JS / HTML content
(Instruments, Panels, Utilities, etc.) due to all the quirks present with the
current version of Coherent. This is mostly due to .CSS limitations or
unresolved bugs currently present with this old version which effectively puts
the MSFS browser at this version: Chrome ---- > 49.0.2623 Safari -------->
604.1.38 The typical case from our side is we have an application that would
work perfectly fine in our Visual Studio and Current version of Edge / Chrome,
Tablets (Android or Apple), etc. and when we port this over to MSFS and all
the UI simply put breaks, and we have to spend an incredible amount of time to
correct glitches, most of the time simply put these glitches cannot be fixed,
and the only alternative is to build custom UI controls for MSFS to bypass
problems, however such UI controls will be bound to the limitations of Chrome
version 49, etc. leaving a bad taste in our mouths since we cannot achieve the
expected results. Fixing some of these issues can take several hours, others
days, and when this adds day after day, you end up with projects delayed for
weeks if not months. More over as time goes by, you end up finding less and
less examples on the Internet regarding how to fix CSS issues with Chrome 49
or earlier, the world is moving fast we are at Chrome version 112… while MSFS
Coherent is stuck in 2016 at the moment, below you can find one of many
examples of things what we cannot use in MSFS causing projects to just fail to
port over:

1240×708 154 KB
Thanks for reading my
question, looking forward to hear what plans we have for the future, since
MSFS project is for more than 10 years, this concerns me, the world will move
very fast in terms of UI for browsers, node, react, etc. and if MSFS cannot
catch up, it could become a big issues for 3rd party developers. Best, Raul

2

Hello, MSFS is already on the latest version of Coherent GT. There is no
version of Coherent which provides a newer version of WebKit than exists in
the sim, nor are there any other Coherent products which offer a wider
coverage of modern web features (other Coherent products are even more
restricted in coverage). There are, of course, other alternatives, such as
using Chrome Embedded Framework, or other projects like those. However, none
of those projects offer customized web engine performance tailored for game
design, and to undertake converting one to something that would reach real-
time game type performance in an embedded context is a massive undertaking on
its own not unlike the scale of the entire sim engine. While the teams are
always investigating all alternatives and technologies, prototyping different
projects and testing them, at this time Coherent GT provides the best and
really only solution for this space, and there are not presently plans to move
away from this framework. Thanks, Matt

3

For me it’s similar to real-world web development where you know which browser
features are long-time trusted so rely mostly on those, and think twice about
using a new feature that typically you can manage perfectly well without. FWIW
I have elements on my panel that need to format differently depending on
sizing but I assumed from the get-go I’d be using JS to dynamically assign a
CSS class or style attributes rather than coding that in the CSS.